“I remember him with a kind of combination laugh and giggle,” actress Michele Lee mused recently, thinking of the Jewish composer Cy Coleman. “He was always smiling.” Her tribute to a beloved mentor, “Nobody Does It Like Me: The Music of Cy Coleman,” runs this Thursday through Saturday at 54 Below ($45-$95; [646] 476-3551). On the program are some of Coleman’s best-known hits, including “Big Spender,” “Witchcraft,” “I’ve Got Your Number,” and “The Best is Yet to Come.”

Even in a city addicted to eye-popping spectacles, Kurt Weill’s “The Eternal Road,” which opened in New York in 1937, was the most extravagant musical production that anyone had ever seen. Intended as a wake-up call to Americans about the worsening plight of the Jews of Germany, the show centers on a rabbi who employs stories from the Hebrew Bible to teach a Jewish boy about his heritage, even as demonic forces gather around the synagogue where the lessons are taking place — forces that the boy may be able to defeat once his education is complete. A new, slimmed-down, concert staging, using one of the work’s original titles, “The Road of Promise,” comes to Carnegie Hall next week with Broadway veteran Ron Rifkin in the cast, along with eight operatic soloists.